From gluttony to philandering, wolf synonymous with bad deeds in children’s literature

It is unfortunate that despite evidence that our forebears tamed the wolf’s ancestors some 32,000 years ago to faithfully dog their master’s footsteps to this day, his villainous role in the story of Red Riding Hood has persisted for over 2,000 years.

Clearly, old enmities die hard and the Brothers Grimm picked up on this basic distrust to tell the tale of the wicked wolf and the innocent granny-loving girl.

Indeed, the wolf has a pretty bad time in the world of children’s literature, inevitably featuring as the brutal omnivore, as likely to wolf down a caped cutie as an unwary piglet. His species, in fact, has become synonymous with bad deeds from gluttony to philandering.

His fellow canids like foxes and jackals, however, get a much kinder deal in most fairy tales, tagged merely as wily and clever.

Now that recent research into the origins of the Red Riding Hood story — fleshing out the classification of children’s tales into genres by the Aarne-Thompson index — also connects it to German lore about what happened to seven goats, the lupus appears to have a good case to howl discrimination.

But given that even the ancient Greek storyteller Aesop gave him short shrift via the fables of a certain alarmist boy and the misuse of sheep’s clothing, there is every chance of his pleas being forever dismissed as merely crying wolf.